1_Prologue_ In Front of the Backstage

PROLOGUE In Front of the Backstage In Academy City, there was a windowless building. It had no doors, windows, hallways, or stairs—it was a building that served no function. Without using teleportation—a Level Four ability—you couldn’t even get into it. At the center of one of its secret rooms was enshrined a giant, cylindrical container. This cylinder, made from reinforced glass, was four meters in diameter and ten meters tall. Each of the room’s four walls was completely covered in a variety of machines and devices. Tens of thousands of cords and tubes extended from them. They crawled about and mingled on the floor, finally connecting to the glass tube in the middle. This windowless room was always in pitch darkness—save for the lights given off by the machines’ lamps and monitors. These lights created a wide circle around the tube, twinkling and sparkling like a starry night sky. A person in a green surgical gown floated upside down in the red fluid filling the tube. This person was the Academy City general board chairman, Aleister. The figure looked both male and female, both old and young, both saintly and sinful. It had given all of its biological functions over to machines, and in doing so, had acquired an estimated lifespan of 1,700 years. The entire body, including the brain, was in a nearly comatose state. Most of its thought processes were assisted by machines. …Now then, let’s begin. As if on cue, the very moment Aleister thought those words, two figures suddenly appeared before the cylinder. One was a petite girl—a user of teleportation. Holding her hand was a tall man, whom she had escorted here. The teleporter silently gave a slight bow, then disappeared once again into thin air. Only the tall man was left in the darkness. He was a young adult who hid his eyes behind blue sunglasses. His short, blond hair was spiked up. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, an outfit wholly inappropriate for the place he was in. He was Motoharu Tsuchimikado, one of Academy City’s pawns. He leaked information to them regarding the English Puritan Church. “Security’s more lax than ever. Are you fooling around or something?” he asked irritably of his employer. He was a spy but far from some submissive toady. His brisk tone would have caused his acquaintances to recoil in surprise. Aleister smiled faintly at his clear dissatisfaction. He replied, “It matters not. We are in pursuit of the intruder as well. We have plenty of options. Simply by changing the route a bit, I can reduce plan 2082 to 2377—” “Let me tell you something,” Tsuchimikado interrupted, slamming a report against the glass cylinder. Clipped to it was a candid photograph showing the visage of the female intruder. She appeared to be in her late twenties. Her blond hair and distinctive brown skin clearly placed her homeland elsewhere. Her hair, though, was mussed and messy like a cheap theater wig. It looked like she didn’t care for it properly. From the back, her silhouette evoked the image of a lion. She wore a jet-black dress decorated end-to-end with white lace in the classic gothic lolita fashion. Its fabric, however, had been worn through, and the lace was frayed and faded. She obviously wore the extravagant clothing on a daily basis. “Sherry Cromwell. She’s no wandering sorcerer—she’s a member of the English Church’s Necessarius. This isn’t like the problem we had with Aureolus.” Tsuchimikado’s expression was irritated, as though he’d been forced to quit smoking. He continued. “The English Puritan Church is like any other human organization. It’s not monolithic. In fact, in terms of its composition, it’s the most complicated state religion in the world. You understand all this, of course!” “Beloved neighbors quarreling amongst themselves. What a delightful workplace, is it not?” “You got that right.” Tsuchimikado sighed. “But it means it has as many different ideals as it has factions, and not all of them are so keen on cooperating with Academy City. Some of them even want to colonize the entire world under the British flag. You may have an arrangement with our princess, but we don’t know how far that’s going to go.” There were those among the many factions who went so far as to be suspicious of the agreement between the leaders of English Puritanism and Academy City. After all, Index, a treasure trove of knowledge, now resided in the city. There wasn’t a doubt in their minds that she presented a very real danger of the Church’s secrets being leaked. Of course, these people probably had no idea that the Knights, an organization separate from Necessarius, were actually absent from their assigned duty of maintaining Index’s security. But it got even worse than that. Even within the Knights, there was a faction that, even after all this time, had inherited the conquering mindset from the age of the Crusades. They viewed Academy City as so dangerous that if Tsuchimikado hadn’t been manipulating the information as well as he was, they might have already made moves to subjugate it. “I can plant ideas in some minds when I infiltrate the Church, but only to a certain extent. I can’t touch the differences between their groups and factions. And even if I did, the information we’ve been controlling would end up getting altered somewhere along the line.” He paused there for a moment, then continued. “And besides, I had my hands full just dealing with the Aureolus situation! Sorcerers must be the ones to judge sorcerers—you would understand that rule far better than I do. Academy City has its science, and the Church its mysteries. We both gain an advantage by having sole possession over our respective technology. Just try to get someone from Academy City to destroy a sorcerer. We defend our technology to the death—just the fact that monopoly could possibly leak would cause enormous political issues.” A young man named Touma Kamijou had fought against a number of sorcerers in the month or so prior. However, the city had made a deal with the Church beforehand in the cases of Stiyl and Kanzaki, and Aureolus and Yamisaka were wandering sorcerers not attached to the Church at all. Discord on those fronts had been mostly avoided. This situation, though, required far more caution. The sorcerer intruding on Academy City possessed many original techniques and spells from English Puritanism. There was no deal this time, either. They couldn’t be sure whether a certain faction had put Sherry up to this or if she was acting on her own. Even if responsibility did fall squarely on her shoulders, however, they couldn’t take her down carelessly. Among her peers at the Royal Academy of Arts, Sherry was the most accomplished decoder of symbolic artwork. Symbolic artwork referred to pictures into which the contents of grimoires were encrypted. Imagine, for example, a painting of a boat floating on the sea, seen from above. The sun is setting over the horizon, bathing the entire image in the golden glow of evening. Normal people would think of it as nothing more than a landscape. However, the seawater represented salt and the sunlight gold—and if you put those two facts together, you could figure out that the painting was describing a magical method of using gold and salt to gain fishlike swimming abilities. In addition, the color and thickness of the paint, the time being evening, the perspective above the boat…Every single part of the painting, down to its most minute details, had some sort of encoded meaning. Oftentimes, hundreds of years would go by before someone realized that a piece of symbolic artwork had been read incorrectly. Becoming a true specialist in this field was incredibly difficult. If Index’s task was the collection and storage of knowledge, then Sherry was an expert at using cipher techniques to seal and unseal that knowledge. If she fell into the hands of another group, then the complex, mysterious decoding arts so long protected by the English Puritan Church would be laid bare to the world. If they took her down without due caution, it would cause relations between the Church and Academy City to begin cracking apart. If the faction that sent her here held ill will toward the city, those cracks would be all the larger. Tsuchimikado didn’t dare say any more than that aloud, though. Rather, he could not. The sentence caught in his throat, then decided instead to speak itself in his chest. The worst-case scenario would be a war of the worlds—a war between science and the Church. He continued, glaring at Aleister. “Well, as long as we don’t make any stupid choices, we won’t fan the flames at all, but someone might drown under the water we use to put them out. Secret machinations always come with collateral damage. What are you thinking, exactly? You could have easily shored up security and prevented far worse breaches than this,” he spat. “Anyway, I’ll defeat her. If a sorcerer does it, it will make the shock waves a little smaller, at least. And I quit being a spy after this, too. It’ll be more than enough for them to call my loyalties into question. For God’s sake…I may be good at worming my way into psychological blind spots, but even I wouldn’t be able to do shit as a spy if I was being monitored around the—” “You needn’t do a thing,” Aleister cut in. Tsuchimikado froze for a moment. He didn’t understand what Aleister was trying to say. “I said, you needn’t do a thing.” “…Are you serious?” he responded, sounding very much like he doubted Aleister’s sanity. “The probability’s not zero, that’s for sure. Covert ops is like getting from one skyscraper to another on a tightrope. Slip up one time and bam, we’re at war!” When blueprints of weapons of mass destruction get leaked to other countries, that’s justification enough to wage war. Arresting a sorcerer within Academy City would carry the same weight. As long as nothing major happened, it wouldn’t end in all-out war. But if something did, then it would. It wouldn’t be a war between nations—it would transcend borders. It would truly be a world war. There wasn’t a major power gap between Academy City’s science and the Church’s occult practices. If a conflict actually started, it would be a protracted one. “Aleister, what are you thinking? Is the prospect of throwing Touma Kamijou at sorcerers that attractive to you? His right hand may be your anti-magic trump card, but it can’t take down the entire Church by itself!” “I can reduce Plan 2082 to 2377. That is my only reason. Why do you ask?” Tsuchimikado caught his breath at that. Plan, Aleister had said—but the nuance was closer to a procedure. Whenever Aleister used that word, it only referred to one thing. “A method for controlling the ith School District…the Five Elements Society,” murmured Tsuchimikado hatefully. The ith School District—with i being the symbol for an imaginary number—was said to be the laboratory that started Academy City itself, but nobody knew where it was now or even if it existed at all. It was treated as an illusion. An urban myth. The rumors went that it had imaginary technology that even current engineering couldn’t reproduce. Some even thought that it secretly held complete sway over the city’s matters. The Church and the sorcerers on the “outside” seemed to think it referred to this very building, but they were wrong. This place wasn’t anything like that. And the truth would never be told to them. There was no way they could tell them. They couldn’t possibly reveal that something with such an immense effect on the city was, in fact, something nobody could control and no one knew the reason for. As the ruler of Academy City, Aleister needed to use any means necessary to gain an understanding of how to control the Five Elements Society. Actually, in all likelihood, he already knew the way to control it. However, they didn’t have the resources necessary to carry it out—they didn’t have the key. It was more of a procedure, similar to how the Level Six Shift experiment with Accelerator was carried out. The key needed to be created in the same way—through a specific sequence of incidents and problems occurring. At the center of that procedure was a single boy: Touma Kamijou. Aleister had planned to involve him in the process from the beginning, but Tsuchimikado suspected that they hadn’t counted on the magical battles with Index and the alchemist. Every time something out of the ordinary happened, Aleister would rearrange the plans. Not only would they correct their mistakes, but they’d use them to their advantage, thus reducing the enormous procedure little by little. So even Sherry Cromwell is factored into it. Aleister’s procedure would end at some point, even if they didn’t meddle here. “All…for that?” “Given this city’s military power and influence, its significance cannot be understated. It is like a runaway horse that could tear the world apart, after all. The safest thing to do is to grab the reins as soon as possible.” Aleister smiled thinly. Tsuchimikado couldn’t sense any one emotion from the gesture. It looked happy, it looked mocking, it looked sad, and it looked pleased, all at the same time. Every feeling he could think of was contained within it. This is insane, he thought with a tsk. He would just ignore Aleister’s orders and deal with Sherry himself if he could, but that wouldn’t happen, either. He had no way of getting out of this building in the first place. It had no exit. No doors, no windows, no hallways, and no stairs. There wasn’t even ventilation—even the necessary air around them was manufactured by on-site facilities. On top of all that, the building was strong enough to withstand the blast wave from a nuclear bomb. Depending on the situation, it was even nastier than being confined in a bank vault or a nuclear shelter. It inspired levels of despair akin to being trapped without a space suit in a shuttle blasting out of the atmosphere. “And I can’t contact anyone outside it, either. Hey, Aleister, use that connection of yours and call that teleporter back. Otherwise, I’ll pull every single cord out of that damn thing of yours.” “I don’t mind. If you wish to relieve stress, then please do as much as you’d like.” Tsuchimikado made a sour face. He had dimly suspected this before, but all the tubes, cords, and machines in this room were probably dummies. If this room alone was enough to cover Aleister’s life support, the building wouldn’t need to be this giant. The cylindrical tube itself was probably one big lie, too. Maybe it was actually a huge hologram projector. He turned his back to the floating Aleister and asked once to be sure. “You’re positive you can avoid war before it happens, right?” “I should be asking you that—it is your job to scuttle around behind the scenes. You must be the one to have confidence. What? Depending on how well you do, these secret machinations of mine may avoid collateral damage entirely.” Shit, he spat. This is what it always came down to—always doing jobs like this. Word Cound: (2656)